Gagik Aroutiunian: The Unexpected Beauty of Oblivion

The Cafesjian Center for the Arts announces the opening of American-Armenian artist Gagik Aroutiunian’s exhibition, The Unexpected Beauty of Oblivion, on July 2, featuring a selection from the artist’s oeuvre.

Gagik Aroutiunian is a multidisciplinary artist working with varied media and experimenting with numerous art forms. According to the artist, his work is “about identity, displacement, and memory.” However, it is the memory that plays a central role in his art, as most of it is woven around this phenomenon.

The Unexpected Beauty of Oblivion is the first solo exhibition of the artist in Armenia, which will feature a selection from three series by Gagik Aroutiunian: Labyrinths of Memory, Legacy, and Family Portrait.

As an artist, Gagik Aroutiunian considers memory as one of the important aspects of identity, and also sees it not as a constant entity, but a transient, fragile and changing one: “This raises a question that I explore in my work: if memory is fragile and changing how does that affect the identity which is displaced from its original environment (place)?” His work, being about identity, displacement, and memory, is “fused” with the artist’s fascination with two different qualitative entities: the rough, explicit, material quality of object/matter, and the ever-elusive image/illusion that we dream, envision, or imagine.

Gagik Aroutiunian’s exhibition, The Unexpected Beauty of Oblivion will be open from July 2 till September 26. The entrance is free of charge.

Gagik Aroutiunian was born in Yerevan. The artist left his education as a physicist in 1968 to pursue his dream of becoming an artist. From 1970 to 1980 he lived in Lithuania and Poland, then moved to Canada in 1980, and finally settled in USA in 1990s. He received degrees from Toronto and Towson universities as a painter and sculptor. He had many solo shows and participated in dozens of group exhibitions in North America and Europe. For the last 20 years he has worked as a professor at the department of art, media and design of the DePaul University (Chicago, USA). His works are featured in museums and galleries, as well as in private collections in Poland, USA, UK, Canada, Germany and other countries.